More Than Brick And Mortar
by Gunney
Summary: The third, and final, installment to the "Street Singer" trilogy. More review to follow. Thank You especially to DaraSarien for your reviews and encouragement.
1. Chapter 1

_He remembered the Brooklyn Bridge. It had barely been finished the year before he came to America and the moment he set eyes on it he was struck by it. The ship on which he stood went under it and he stared up at the underbelly with the eyes of a man still young, a vampire not yet used to the beast within and only recently back in control of the future of his genius. America had been the place for new starts and he had come here to work with a man named Edison. He had barely been in the city a day before he was asked to come to the home Edison lived in. A journey that would require many different modes of public transportation as Tesla had next to nothing to his name and could not hire a private buggy. _

_So he was on a barge, traveling slowly down the East River, when a giant brick and cabled edifice caught and captured his attention. It was long enough to join both sides of the river and pass over many of the river front streets and alleys on both sides. Wide enough to allow for trolley, horse and buggy and pedestrian traffic. There were giant American flags flying from the top of its two towers, snapping sharply in the wind. As if instead of being built, this structure had been discovered by an intrepid explorer, who had climbed the bricks and the steel girders and the span of cables and planted the banner of his nation there at the top. _

_But Nikola knew better. He knew this was a masterful feat of cunning and genius and at the very next stop that the barge made Tesla disembarked, his original purpose completely forgotten, the Brooklyn Bridge, and its mysteries, overwhelming everything in him. He ran through the streets dodging hacks and vendors and women with prams and mounted police men with batons and copper badges. Feeling a mix of jealousy, rage, fear and joy that he could not contain._

_The city bustled and clanked, and tooted and grunted around him. There were other ships moving up and down the river, delivering lorries with bread and fish and street urchins darting at them like seagulls any time they stopped, grubby hands reaching out to grab what little nourishment they could. _

_There was the smell of the river and the manure from the horses, the sun warmed brick and plaster, smoke from the glass factories and sulfur from the contact of metal and electric wires. Electricity…_

_Nikola was smiling under his moustache as he rounded the bend and saw the most enlightened, fearsome, architectural behemoth he had yet been given the honor to examine, stretching languorously like the work of artistic beauty that it was, in the hazy afternoon sunlight. _

_He walked the length of the bridge once, surrounded by promenading men and women, some gaily dressed, others looking to fleece those better plumed than they. A man had set up his wares near the middle of the first section of the bridge but he didn't appear to be there permanently. He looked over his shoulder often, only hesitantly calling out to passersby. As the trolley came near, the tracks separated from the pedestrian promenade by only two feet of concrete and an iron fence, the seller spotted someone on board and packed away what he had quickly before moving on. _

_The trolley passed and Nikola hurried to the end of the bridge, the Brooklyn side, so that he could catch and ride it. _

_He spent the rest of the day riding, walking or running from one end to the other. He studied the bridge from below while he still had day light, then stepped onto its deck once more as the sun began to set. With few pedestrians left to see him he climbed up into the cable webbing near the first tower and looked out over the city. He felt the incredible tension in those cables, and the continuous vibrations caused by the wind, the traffic, by the very pull of the earth itself. Below him electricity sparked from the passing trolley, horses hooves struck the cobble stone like flint on steel, a young couple had stopped under the shadow of the tower to build up an entirely different kind of power. Overhead the beginnings of a summer storm broiled in the clouds. _

_Everything that excited him, that awoke his heart to passionate throbbing, that broke through the layers of disappointment, betrayal, denial and the depression that seemed to have followed him from the day that he first realized he could never really please his father. All that made him more than a monster had come to life in him on the Brooklyn Bridge. There, over ten stories above the surface of the river, Nikola fell in love for the second time in his life. _

_With the bridge, in a way, but mostly with the city it was planted in. A city that could bustle and bray without being threatening. A city that birthed men of science and architecture and medicine and ingenuity. A city that allowed the lowest caste to become the highest, most powerful of kings. This city, and the country that had given him entry, he now loved. _

When the private jet landed Nikola found himself reliving his first days in America. The boat over, the smells, the sounds. They had changed so drastically in the past hundred or so years. He and Helen would be staying at one of her safe houses in the city. They hadn't been able to contact Daniel yet, and Tesla had yet to inform Bijou that her brother was alive.

They had decided that meeting with Daniel was their first goal and from there…

Helen had her own business to attend to in the city, turning the trip into quasi business. They had agreed to meet at the safe house around eight and go out for a late dinner on the town. There was one spot that Tesla had been thinking about, unable to shake from the moment he realized he would be back in New York City.

He took a cab across the island, ignoring and being ignored by the middle eastern driver. It was edging towards fall and the sky had darkened enough by the time he got to the bridge that he could see the twin beams of light shooting toward the sky where the Trade Towers had been. The rest of the city had grown up around it such that it looked hardly recognizable as the structure he remembered. It had been reinforced, some of the material on the deck had changed, there were new patches of brick on the towers that tried to match the original tan, but failed. The improvements in a way ruining the structure.

"And yet you've lasted how many years?" He asked, walking through the bustling stream of students, junkies, McDonald's workers and single parents using the pedestrian path to get across the river. The bridge had continued on, unmoved by storms and wars and protests. Suicide attempts. Publicity stunts.

Some of the improvements he recognized as having come from work he had done in those early years. Before Edison's betrayal, before The New Yorker, before Belgium, the war. Before Bijou, and before Daniel.

He was planning to build a bridge, he realized. Planning to span and close a gap that no one had realized existed until very recently. He had briefly imagined it might be an easy task. But he knew better. He could mold earth, steel or electricity if he had to, but people, no. People took time. This bridge would take time.

He stayed with the Brooklyn Bridge until it was time to meet Helen for dinner.


	2. Chapter 2

**The chapters may be slow in coming but they are coming. Today's installment is dedicated to myself, because it is my birthday!**

* * *

April 1943

Outside Dachau, Germany

The truck rocked back and forth on a road that had been frozen solid most of the winter and only today, reluctantly, under the abuse of a torrential rainstorm, had begun to thaw, oozing mud through the wounds that had been inflicted by the cold.

The truck was not well populated. One man drove, sitting alone in the cab. Two passengers in the back that he had only known for a matter of minutes. The driver, Laurens Dekker, wore an ink black SS uniform, the uniform of a Captain. He could neither lay claim to the insignia marking his rank, nor to the band at his arm parading Hitler's swastika in a field of blood. The uniform was not his, the doctrine was not his, the only thing he would lay claim to was the truck.

It was his truck and his underground operation. Small but efficient. He had no confidents, he had no weaknesses. No wife or children to worry after, no partner, no lover. He was alone in his endeavor and he considered that to have been his greatest ally. If you worked alone there was no one to betray you.

He had been wired money, British notes, the message with them was coded first in English, translated, then coded again in Dutch. Someone was in a prison camp where he did not belong. Someone needed to be pulled from the prison camp as soon as possible. The note had not specified why the person was important, or whether or not they should be brought out alive.

He had been given a description. Considering where he was going he had no doubt that he would recognize the man when he saw him. Prison camps tended to take individuals and melt them down into the barest possible resemblance to humanity. In some cases it took months, others, weeks. But he was told, this man would not have changed. He would still look human, no matter how long he had been there.

The money he had been given was excessive, especially in war time. Whoever had arranged it wanted this man badly. Dekker spent a week back tracking the message, attempting to find its origin. He planned and plotted, arranged to have certain uniforms made, considered strategy, all before actually accepting that he would undertake the job. Any job could be a trap. He had decided that early on. Even a lone man with a single truck could be a thorn in the side of the enemy, and he could be plucked out the moment he was discovered.

He would not be saving a hoarde of orphans, nor would he be the one to end the war and bring peace to the torn nations. He had no such aspirations. He felt, thus, that it was appropriate to keep his risks as minimal as his goals.

I am a mercenary, Dekker said to himself, allowing the wheels of the truck to slew through a complicated maze of melted snow, pot holes, mud and standing water, holding down the clutch and letting the engine idle until he felt the rubber grip on gravel again before he pressed on the gas.

I work for money, he thought. He raced the engine through its cycles, revving it faster and faster, picking up speed as the country around him started to dissolve. More houses, more buildings, more vehicles and better roads. More speed.

I plan everything I do, carefully and methodically, he thought. This was the city. This was Dachau. Surrounded by farms and gardens, hilly country. Businesses, factories, churches, and homes at its nucleus. A place like any other place. Except that just outside its doors there stood a giant prison. Meant to be hidden in the countryside. Meant to be unobserved. Meant to conceal the horrors that took place inside the stone, barbed wire walls.

I plan so that everything happens without problems, he thought. He had painted the side of his truck with a sign. It said Hans Deiter, Painter and Crafter of Fine Arts. It had a false address and a false phone number, surrounded by brightly colored curli cues and stars, sketched by a talented hand on a giant sheet of canvas that he stored, rolled up, on top of the truck. The walls of the vehicle were formed by tightly fitted slabs of wood, military and correct and drab green, until he rolled down the canvas. Until the sign covered the side of the truck. It was all part of the plan. It was all part of the perfect, calculated escape.

"I do not transport dead men." He had said it before. Three times in fact. The first time he had said it he thought he was only thinking it. He had stared into the determined face of the man he was sent to rescue, baffled at what he thought he might have just heard, and said those exact words. Moments later he said it again, only this time he knew he was saying it, and saying it loud and clear. He had his hands under the arms of a dead man who managed to weigh a ton despite being pole thin, was carrying that dead man toward his truck with the aide of the man he was sent to rescue, saying that he, Laurens Dekker, did not transport dead man.

The dead man was in his truck, twitching still despite the thousands of volts of electricity that had been conducted through his body. A natural force that had blown a three foot crater into the hard packed gravel, knocked a dozen SS Men from their feet and set a Nazi flag pole, not only the flag, but the pole as well, on fire. The man he was to rescue, a Polish national Stefan Starzynski, President of Warsaw, was climbing into his truck after the body of the dead man and Dekker stood there and proclaimed, "I do not transport dead men."

The bigger man, Starzynski, smiled. In broken, low German he said, "You need not worry, for he is neither."

Then there was no more time. The confusion caused by the lightning strike would not last much longer and they had many miles to cover. Dekker, baffled, rushed to the front of the truck and jumped inside, released the brake, grateful that he had been wise enough to leave the motor running. The truck lurched forward and left the camp.

Just drive he had told himself, to Dachua, to Munich. To the safe house where the papers and tickets were. There they could bury the dead man, or perhaps leave him to rot. It was undignified, but so was everything else in Germany these days. Then to the train that would take them south and east, to Switzerland.

* * *

Present Day

New York City, New York

Helen was surprised to find that she was nervous. She had expected to be detached from it all, just helping a friend. There was nothing life threatening about this particular mission, they didn't have a deadline. It was laid back, just a meeting with a woman about a man. Nothing more. And yet she could feel the queasy mix of adrenaline and too much caffeine in her stomach. She might have blamed it on the wine she had consumed the night before. On the more than slightly intoxicated condition in which she had found herself, after dinner with Nikola had turned into a quasi-celebratory night on the town.

There had been dancing. There had been an impromptu ride around Central Park. There had been a very long walk around Ground Zero. They had talked, a little. But most of that time they had been quiet. Remembering. Pondering the times they had been together in the city, even more so the times they had been there apart. Nikola had told her about the Brooklyn Bridge. Helen had reminisced about her arrival on the Carpathian which had led them to where the evening ended at Battery Park. Nikola had used his abilities to get them past the security gates and they sat in the moonlit night watching the tide roll, watching the harbor lights and the ships in the distance and the Statue of Liberty, tall, proud, and in so many ways unchanged.

The city vibrated at low ebb behind them. Helen knew it had to be close to three in the morning. She had turned her head to look at Nikola, to suggest that they head back so that at least she might get some sleep. She was bracing herself, even before she spoke, for the innuendo that she expected to follow the statement. But she never said a word.

Nikola's eyes were closed, his head slightly bowed, his hand outstretched only a fraction of an inch, just enough for his position to look too awkward for him to be at rest. His fingers were twitching at the end of his hand and she watched them, followed the path they were indicating, stared out across the water and then gasped in surprise when every light on Liberty Island winked out. No, not every light. A second later she could make out the fainter glow of the lights in the crown, still bright and blue in a perfect crescent. And above that the torch itself was still lit.

She glanced briefly back to Nikola, who was smiling quietly, blinking his eyes open a second later. Meeting her gaze.

"They can't be extinguished." He said softly, smiling at her, then flicking his wrist. The spot lights that bathed the island flared into the night, bright as day, then darkened again. Like a flash of lightning had hit the tiny scrap of land. When the spots faded from her eyes she saw the torch and the crown, burning on. "Not by a power outage anyway. In the fifties and sixties when the brain children that had welcomed the nuclear age with the atom bomb realized that the US could be Russia, or Cuba's, next target, a very small group was designated to predict the aftermath. No one liked what they had to say."

Helen smirked wryly and nodded. "Undoubtedly." She said.

"But…one very wise young man stepped forward at a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and said, "What about the Liberty Statue?"." Nikola's voice had slipped effortlessly back a hundred years as he finished the sentence, the heavy consonants of someone born in Croatia, of Serbian lineage, who had traveled the world over coloring the hearsay words of the 'wise young man'.

Helen's eyes immediately brightened and she stared at Tesla, disbelief and wonder pounding under the intoxicating sweep of the wine and the night and the scent of the man beside her. She waited, knowing that she would be pleasantly surprised by whatever he said next.

Nikola grinned, knowingly. "Well perhaps he wasn't there in person. It could have been that he merely sent an anonymous notice, and a set of diagrams, and a finished product. But…this wise young man suggested that a nation, destroyed by the devastation of a nuclear war, would need, more than anything else, a surviving symbol of hope. Something that could not be extinguished by massive electromagnetic radiation."

Still looking at her, still holding every fiber of her focus with the mere dilation of an iris, Nikola's wrist flicked again. The spot lights flared. Another light had started toward the island, a Harbor Security boat, the officer probably thinking that someone had snuck onto the island and was messing with the breaker boxes.

When Tesla broke eye contact it was to grin impishly toward the island. He was enjoying his mischief but it also seemed he was done causing trouble for the moment.

Helen had found she had nothing to say to him. He had opened yet another door to the past that she knew so little about. It was something so foreign to her character that she did not have the vocabulary to properly respond so she remained quiet.

They returned to the safe house an hour later. She went to sleep, he went to the library. The next morning he was gone and she had a message on her phone. An agreement to a late lunch meeting.

She had showered and dressed and was on her way an hour in advance.

The hour only allowed her enough time to realize that she was nervous. To think about the night before, and the wine. To wish that she hadn't had so much of it, and order another cup of tea. And to hope…hope that she would get all the way through the meal before something happened.

What could happen? She didn't know. And yet she had come to the Bridge Café on Water Street, the restaurant a suggestion of Nikola's, expecting hostility, disbelief, anger, frustration. That was the danger when digging up the past, especially the past of a people whose lives were nearly destroyed by those they were meant to have trusted.

The street tables were open but given how warm it was Helen had chosen to sit inside. She had done her best not to view her seating arrangement as a threat assessment. Just a chat, just some food. Yet she was sitting facing the door, the other chair set neutrally at an angle, not straight on. Neither forcing her guest to sit with her back to the door, nor allowing her the prime position that Helen held.

She had been told that her dinner guest might be a little late. Anne Brouse-Hamtramck had been troubled by the distribution of her publishing company for some time and had finally tracked down the issue. She hadn't gone into great detail but the implication was that she intended to fix the problem personally. She would call and reschedule if she was permanently detained, she said. Helen had liked the commanding tone in her voice, the open honesty and responsibility that came so clearly over the phone.

She was waiting ten minutes before she finally got a look of Ms. Hamtramck in person. Her first shock of the afternoon was at how short the woman was. Barely four foot five, slender but powerfully built. The way Helen imagined one of Henry's elves might look. The Dungeons and Dragons sort of elves of course, and not the sort rumored to help Saint Nick…

Anne Brouse-Hamtramck wasted no time weaving through the tables, headed directly toward Helen without pause or question. The host was nowhere in sight and Anne didn't stop before sliding into the seat provided for her and turning to Helen expectantly.

Once seated the diminutive woman pulled her pocket book into her lap, drove her hand into it and came out with a well-used spiral notebook. This she opened with a flick of the wrist on the table, opening the book to an empty page, the other hand coming up with a pen. She depressed the tip of the pen, poised the roller ball against the paper and turned to Helen.

"You have ten minutes." She said, then waited.

For a full thirty seconds Helen was speechless. She moved her mouth to no effect and it took even longer before she was even able to realize that she _wasn't _speaking.

"Ms. Hamtramck-"

"Brouse-Hamtramck."

"Ms. Brous-"

"If all you wanted was to get my name right I could have saved you the reservation. Here is my card." Anne said, pulling the stiff cardstock from her purse and flipping it onto the table. Helen wasn't in the least surprised that it landed face up.

"I've actually come to ask you about your father."

"Mr. Daniel Brouse, I assume he is the father you refer to, is no longer one of my clients. I am unaware of his exact whereabouts, and even if I did know, there are still some things that publishers will keep confidential these days, despite popular belief."

Helen was grasping at straws, desperately scraping together the jigsaw puzzle of a conversation, blindly, without a clue as to its size, shape, picture. Hostility, cold brusqueness that somewhat explained the lack of a response when she had sent her first e-mail to Anne. Desperately Helen tried to remember how long ago the book had been published.

"I have a friend, who is the son of someone Daniel knew in Germany."

"That's hardly possible, all of those that he knew in the prison camps are dead. Their children rarely speak of the war, in fact they resent it. And I doubt your 'friend' is an acquaintance of one of their grandchildren. My son-" She stopped herself, the stiff resentment that had been the framework of her face had begun to melt a little. The moment she personalized the conversation she strengthened her resolve and the walls behind it. "Seven minutes."

"This friend…this friend's father was mentioned in your fa-in Mr. Brouse's book. He-" Helen stopped herself. The original plan had been to present Nikola as an interested relative of a Holocaust survivor. As a man trying to track down the life of a father that he barely knew. It had sounded good before, and far better than Helen trying to explain a Serbian vampire who became a Belgian spy before being placed in a German concentration camp.

But none of that would work. Helen hadn't expected the forceful, businesslike manner that Ms. Brouse-Hamtramck had densely packed into her tiny frame. She had been in fact convincing herself that such a thing wasn't possible. That it was only paranoia on her part that alerted her to the approach of disaster.

Her silence appeared to Anne to be an invitation and she proceeded to take up the slack.

"Ms. Magnus, you have four minutes remaining. Since you appear to have run out of stories let me share with you some advice. This is a city of progress, a nation of progress. Progress means moving forward and not looking back. I do not appreciate, nor do I encourage anyone who lives in the past. My father was a man of progress until he wrote that book. I was a fool to have helped him do it. It brought to life a past that he should have left behind. Now he is lost in that past. If your friend is that desperate to find him he can start looking in New Jersey."

A manicured finger tapped the side of the pen in her hand and the ball point disappeared. The pen was tucked into its place, the note book closed, the pages still void of ink. With efficient and practiced movements Anne had her belongings once more hidden away in her pocket book and was standing, pushing in her chair in the last thirty seconds that she had allotted.

"Thank you for lunch." Anne said, then turned and marched back out to the street, leaving Helen in stunned silence.


	3. Chapter 3

Munich, Germany

April 1943

Nikola woke suddenly. The knuckles in his fingers crunched, the vertebrae in his spine crackled, his jaw muscles clenched and his eyes snapped open, his irises going from silver dollars to pin points, then settling somewhere in between.

First there was the awareness of life. Then there was the pain. From the arches of his feet, to his knees, to his hips, to his chest, to his shoulders and arms, and culminating in a brass stage band blasting Tommy Dorsey in his head, everything hurt.

He opened his mouth, his brain silently suggesting that if he screamed it might relieve the pressure, he might feel some of the pain dying. But the moment he drew oxygen tainted with the smell of exhaust and paint fumes into his lungs the pain worsened. His lateral muscles froze forcing him partially upright, away from the rocking floor that he had been lying on, curling around the pain. Then the noise came. Strangled, desperate, higher pitched than he thought he was capable of.

Any strength he might have had before that sound left his mouth disappeared once his muscles relaxed. He was instantly drained, lying back against a bouncing surface with nothing but tar running through his veins. His heart was beating a mile a minute, he could feel it echoed in the pain in his skull, but it wasn't pumping blood. It was pumping mercury. There was no other explanation.

And something else…

Something that started to burn in the pit of his stomach the moment he realized it was there. It burned and turned and he felt like he would vomit. But he couldn't purge what wasn't there.

He tried to shift again. More pain, more crackling from joints that had stiffened, and very little progress.

The ground continued to quake underneath him. The air around him was chilled and he felt a dozen nightmares descending on him from every direction. It was all too familiar.

* * *

Stefan watched the vampire wake. He sat horrified and fascinated, sickened and elated watching, for the first time, a man coming back from the dead. If security protocol had not required him to ride in the back of the truck he would have insisted on it. He would not, could not as a scientist, miss seeing this. There had been this insane urge to see if everything Gregg had said was true, this desperate drive to witness, for himself, the impossible.

If he were to categorize his reasons for insisting that the driver take Nikola as well, that would have been the first. The second reason…the vampire and scientist was an asset, clearly, and not someone that they could afford to leave in Axis hands. But more…he was something so entirely new…something even nature herself couldn't destroy.

Stefan tracked the progress of healing. Watched bones snap into place that had been wrenched free of their cradles as a result of the violent thrashing the lightning had enacted on Tesla's body. Traced the fading patches of blackened, burned skin, fried veins, and burst capillaries.

The vampire had died with his eyes open. Stefan's discomfort when staring into those vacant eyes had led to his forcing the lids back into place. When they snapped back open, of their own accord, and maddened silver blue eyes searched the shadows for something to focus on Stefan jumped, involuntarily.

He watched as the first pains of new life began to fade, then a new and vastly different pain visited the creature and Tesla writhed, letting out a strangled cry. Stefan remembered the look he had seen on Tesla's face earlier that day. When the two stood opposite one another in an empty room, the vampire insistent on keeping his distance.

He had thought then that he knew the reason. Now he was even more certain. The creature was hungry. Stefan could only assume that what he consumed was blood. And when it came to providence, Stefan was the only available source in that very small space.

Tesla began to gasp, desperately clawing at the air with his lungs, his whole body involved in the process of taking in oxygen and expelling carbon monoxide. Stefan wondered if he would have to defend himself. If he _could _defend himself against the creature. The vampire was weak, desperate, had been tortured and killed at least once. Would that be enough to give Stefan the edge he might need to overpower an attack?

The truck lurched, slowing, grinding as the gears shifted down. He had been deaf to the sounds of civilization before but now he could hear the murmur of day time Munich through the rough boards. It had to be Munich. There were no other large cities on this road before Munich.

The thin Serbian writhed still on the truck bed but his desperation seemed to have eased. His eyes had closed again.

Stefan shifted, moving towards the wall that separated the bed from the cab. He knocked on the wood, felt its solid construction and the sound, bouncing back at him instead of echoing into empty space. He searched the truck bed, found a spare metal hinge lying in the dark corner near his feet, and used the aluminum piece like a crow bar, wedging the end between the boards.

He scraped and dug and pried and finally managed to create a space just big enough to see through with one eye pressed in close. Yes, they were in Munich. He could see it through the window of the cab.

"We're not…in Dachau?" The voice came to Stefan, raw, strained. But the restriction was self-imposed. Nikola was aware of himself, barely, and holding tightly to what remained of his humanity, pushing back the hunger.

"Munich. We're likely to go from here to a train. Go south to Switzerland." Stefan said, glancing behind him. Nikola still lay on the truck bed, his arms pulled tightly in toward his sides, hands balled into fists, pressing down against his chest. Stefan asked him, "You are in need of blood?"

The very sound of the word seemed to break the Serbian's concentration. His back arched away from the truck bed again and his face contorted into a tight, pale grimace. Every muscle achingly taut, he sat up fully, still keeping his fists tightly pressed against his chest. Moments later Stefan saw something pale red sliding down one of the vampire's wrists. It was blood, but not quite the right shade.

The truck continued through the streets, making turn after turn. Their path caused the light to shift constantly and it took a few minutes before Stefan got another glimpse of the vampire. He focused on the same wrist and jumped with alarm when he saw the black spikes protruding from the backs of his hands, angling down over his wrists.

Claws, he realized a second later, staring speechless as Tesla finally regained control, the claws disappearing through the broken skin, leaving behind four neat holes on each hand.

"Yes." Nikola said, finally. Forcing the word through clenched teeth.

Stefan felt the adrenaline crashing through him and began to regret his insistence that the vampire come along.

* * *

Present Day

New York City, New York

Helen was able to repeat the entire conversation, word for word to Nikola. It had only lasted ten minutes, and she had barely spoken in that time. In fact the sentences she had managed had been so flustered and jumbled, she wondered if she had become senile, finally, in her extreme old age. She waited, quietly, for Nikola to get in his punches but he merely smirked at her, letting his face convey what a less mature Tesla might have once delighted in saying out loud.

"She was so shut off, so closed away from me. She could not have known that my intention was to bring up her father until after I mentioned his name and yet from the beginning she was guarded."

"It isn't too far fetched to assume that she has always been that way. Helen, she grew up in the midst of the women's liberation movement. She runs her own publishing company against thousands of competitors quite a few of whom are still run entirely by men. She's had to be stern and flawlessly professional most of her life."

Helen watched him, her eyes distant, her head already shaking. "No. No that I expected. There was more to it." She said, biting at her lower lip in a gesture so characteristic of Helen Magnus that Nikola was instantly thrown back to a sun drenched lab, the smell of lead and mercury bubbling, sulfur in the air. John, James, Nigel.

"She called her father a man of progress _until_ he wrote the book. And she said that she had encouraged him to do it. Why would she? A woman that intelligent would surely consider helping her father reawaken memories to be a hindrance to forgetting the past. She seemed bitter, as if she had been listening to her father's stories all her life, and yet she acted as if the book itself had been the trigger for a flood of…"

Tesla had raised one brow, then the other a second later, as he listened to her speak, and watched her trace the small woman around in her mind. Helen trailed off and gave him a look, as if to reassure him that she wasn't insane, nor had she been rambling.

Tesla crossed his arms over his chest and gave her a pleased, but quiet smile. "She has a son?" He asked.

Helen tilted her head to the side considering the new angle Nikola had proposed.

"Shouldn't be too hard to find, and he might be a little more forth coming given the right incentive." The inventor grinned wolfishly and bounced his eyebrows.

Helen ground at her front teeth, her eyes narrowed in warning. "I think perhaps I should be the one to speak to him. And in the mean time you can start scouring New Jersey for Daniel."

Tesla pouted, and Helen turned away to hail a cab.


End file.
